Air propelled toys enjoy increasing popularity, and particularly popular air propelled toys include blow guns, air propelled rockets, and paintball guns. Remarkably, while automation and launch power of most of such toys has considerably increased, devices and configurations for air propelled launchers using only the breath of a player (i.e., blowguns) remained relatively simple.
A general depiction of a known blowgun is shown in U.S. Des. Pat. No. 358,444 to Bybee and a similar blowgun is further described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,419,978 to Loftus. In one improvement of a blowgun as described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,588,413 to Nagasue, the mouthpiece is configured such that the sights mounted on the barrel of the gun are visible while the mouthpiece of the blowgun is in the user's mouth. Here, the mouthpiece is angled and mounted to the barrel, such that the mouthpiece must either be taken off the barrel, or that a latch must be opened to insert the arrow. While such an improvement significantly facilitates accurate launching, the angled mouthpiece tends to prevent fast acceleration of the projectile as the air is forced into a turbulent path before hitting the projectile.
In other known improvements, the number of rounds that can be fired from a blowgun is increased, and various configurations for such improvements have been described. For example, Arbun (U.S. Pat. No. 3,137,287) and Hoverath et al. (U.S. Pat. No. 3,388,696) described configurations in which multiple rounds are advanced from a magazine that is attached to the barrel of the blowgun. Alternatively, and especially where the rounds are generally spherical objects (e.g., peas, or round pellets), multiple rounds can be fed from a separate tube through a manually operated adapter element as shown in U.S. Pat. No. 2,888,003 to Swanson, or automatically in rapid succession under the force of gravity as described in U.S. Pat. No. 2,427,490 to Berrayarza et al. In still further known configurations, automatic gravity-driven reloading from a movable hopper allows firing of successive rounds of peas or other objects as described in U.S. Pat. No. 1,152,447 to Sproull.
However, despite the relatively simple configurations of most, if not all of the known blowguns, the feeding mechanism often tends to jam due to incomplete automatic insertion of the next round. Moreover, where the projectile is relatively soft or is soaked with a fluid, most, if not all of the known blowguns would fail to reliably reload the blowgun. Therefore, although there are numerous configurations and methods known in the art for improving one or more aspects of use in a blow gun, all or almost all or then suffer from several disadvantages. Thus, there is still a need to provide improved blowguns, especially where soft and/or fluid-soaked projectiles are propelled from the blowgun.